Mass production PCB testing

[Florin Olariu]

Hello guys ,

We developed a product that using a nRF51xx chip and now we are preparing for mass production. The antenna was designed on PCB and for PCB we are using FR4

Our big concern is that the FR4 material is not designed for 2.4 GHz and because of the PCB manufacturer's tolerance we may have quality issues.

My questions are (maybe they are stupid but I need to ask :) ):

• There is a fast way to test the quality of the PCB on the production line before to solder the components ?

• Can we use the DTM (together with a golden sample setup) to evaluate automatically the quality of the PCB antenna ?

• What kind of tests you are running on the production line to ensure the quality of your products ?

Thank you.

[FormerMember]

• The PCB material on our dev. kits is FR-4, see this thread for some more details.

• By "quality of the antenna" I assume that you mean the range. For testing the antenna in production, measuring the RSSI is the only way to do that. I would think that it is possible to use DTM for that, however, the example that we provide does only return the Packet Error Rate (PER). It may be an option to use the radio or the radio_test example in the SDK, and then retrieve the RSSI. An example of how to retrieve the RSSI can be found here.

• This thread has some suggestions for some basic testing.